For the first time, a car company has put a date on shipment of a car with self-driving ability.

According to British site Auto Express, Mercedes has revealed that their 2013 S-class will feature self-driving. Not clear if there is an official company press release, though the company has been talking about such features, as have many other companies. Realize that the 2013 model year is just a year away.

The car will feature radar based automatic cruise control, combined with lane-marker following, and the automatic driving will only operate below 40kph. In other words, this is designed to let you take your hands off the wheel in stop-and-go traffic jams, not to drive you at actual open driving speeds. You’ll need to pay attention to the road, not read a book, but at that low speed you’ll have decent warning if something goes wrong and the car starts drifting, so I suspect that in spite of warnings not to do so, people will get away with minor tasks like reading a few e-mails or even sending some.

While a very basic level introduction, this is still a milestone and will pave the way (love those road metaphors) for other companies. While the focus of the DARPA grand challenges and most visions of the robocar future has been on cars that can drive completely on their own, there are now strong signals that the technology will arrive in the form of driving assist, and human drivers will be called upon to still do much of the driving, in particular the tricky bits the systems aren’t safe to handle. In my article a few years ago the roadmap to robocars I suspected we might see a few specialized applications first, such as robot valet parking and even autonomous vehicles for military delivery applications, but now the autopilot is on track for showing up commercially first.